Dr Emily Corran, UCL History Awarded 2023 Philip Leverhulme Prize

Emily Corran has won a 2023 Philip Leverhulme Prize for her work on the intellectual and social history of Catholicism in the Later Middle Ages. Her project investigates casuistry, the discipline concerned with practical ethics and fine-grained moral choice. Casuistry is an aspect of religious thought that is most associated with the Jesuits and the polemics of the Counter-Reformation, but in fact was a long-running scholastic discipline which first emerged at the end of the twelfth century and came to prominence in the later Middle Ages. Emily’s first book, Lying and Perjury in Medieval Practical Thought (OUP 2018) investigated medieval answers to the question, ‘Is it ever morally justifiable to lie, to deceive, or to break a promise?’, and showed how a casuistical discipline for evaluating complicated, real-world dilemmas emerged in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century church. Emily plans next to write a book on the medieval history of casuistry, as well as editing and translating a medieval casuistical manual. In her new project, supported by the Leverhulme award, Emily moves her focus beyond the Christian tradition, in a new project on comparative medieval family law in medieval Islam, Judaism and Christianity. 

Image credit: The Fitzwilliam Museum (2023) "Miniature from a copy of Gratian, Decretum", Creative Commons.